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FILM; Where the Wheel Was Reinvented

By NEIL STRAUSS

Published: April 28, 2002

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—
I LIVE in Santa Monica, right off Bicknell Hill. I buy my surfing gear at Horizons West two blocks away on Main Street, and, when a fin snapped off my board two weeks ago, the owner, Randy West, took it to Aqua-Tech, where a guy named Skip Engblom repaired it.

You may be wondering what the significance of this is; it sounds so routine, after all.

That's what I thought, too -- until I saw ''Dogtown and Z-Boys: A Film About the Birth of the Now.'' The documentary, released on Friday in New York and Los Angeles, looks back on a time when South Santa Monica (and neighboring Venice) was a bohemian slum nicknamed Dogtown and not a strip of resort hotels. It tells of the Zephyr Skating Team, a handful of talented and territorial surf rats, who helped bring about the enduring phenomenon that is modern-day skateboarding.

Horizon Wests is the site of the old Zephyr surf shop, where the proprietors, Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom, custom-designed gear and put together the Zephyr Team, which included two guys, Stacy Peralta (the documentary's director) and Tony Alva, who would go on to become international skateboarding legends. Bicknell Hill was where the Zephyr crew (a k a the Z-Boys) learned to surf on land by slaloming on skateboards.

Here, not only was punk-rock skateboarding born, but so was the lifestyle, attitude and D.I.Y. aesthetic that would beget today's extreme sports (with their X Games festival) and MTV's ''Jackass'' madness.

Suddenly, in light of this documentary -- which grabbed a best documentary director and audience award last year at Sundance -- an overdeveloped community known for its spas and Jamba Juice now seems loaded with historical and countercultural significance. And what's special about this is not that skate culture is transforming the image of a neighborhood, but that the world is transforming the image of skate culture.

Skateboarding is now not just respectable but artistic. It is a part of the current Whitney Biennial in New York, which includes paintings with skateboards attached by Ouattara Watts and images of William Pope.L training for a performance art piece in which he plans to spend five years crawling through Manhattan with a skateboard affixed to his back. It is the focus of cutting-edge art galleries like New Image in Los Angles, Alleged in New York and the skate-shop-turned-gallery Circle-A in San Jose, Calif. And it is the subject of academic books like ''Skateboarding and the City, the Body and Architecture'' by Iain Borden, a British professor of architecture.

The skateboard started off early in the 20th century as a scooterlike contraption made from two roller skates attached by a two-by-four plank. By the late 50's, as the surfing craze picked up steam, skateboarding began to develop into a full-fledged concrete surfing trend. It all but disappeared a decade later, however, after a number of fatal accidents. But then, in the early 70's, a surfer replaced the old unwieldy clay wheels of old boards with smooth urethane ones, and a trend was reborn. Around this time, thanks to a California drought, the Z-Boys began scouting rich peoples' houses to commandeer (and sometimes drain) their swimming pools to create proto-skate parks.

Since the 80's, few American cities have been without their stretch of pavement -- Astor Place in Manhattan, Oak Street Beach in Chicago, Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. -- where skate punks gather to impede pedestrians and traffic with ollies, kickflips and grinds. With hot-shot surf punks taking over the beaches, streets and sidewalks, it was no surprise that turned next to the mountains. Now the peaks are loud with punk-rock as snowboarders swish through half-pipes. And with land and sea conquered, the culture is moving into the air, thanks to sky surfing and parasurfing.

It seemed only natural, then, that after years of complaining about skaters, the establishment would buckle. First came the entrepreneurs and sponsors; then the advertising, music and film industries. (A feature film about the Z-Boys is in the works at New Line.) And now, always arriving last and loudest to the party, comes the art community. (Even the military is taking note: one member of the Dogtown family is using surfboard technology to design plane wings.)

Of course, to those in the subculture, skateboard designs have always been display-ready art. But given the Whitney Biennial, countless contemporary galleries and the film-festival circuit, the skateboard now appears to be the new found-object of choice. The lesson here is: Kids, go ahead and rebel; it doesn't matter, because in 20 years, when you or a buddy becomes a successful investment banker, that symbol of your rebellion is going to be hanging on your wall as art anyway.

That explains why, when walking across the Third Street Promenade here last week, I noticed a commotion in a fine-art and architecture bookstore. Drifting into the store and signing the book ''Dogtown: The Legend of the Z-Boys'' was Jeff Ho, Peggy Oki, Wentzle Ruml, Bob Biniak and Nathan Pratt -- all Z-Boys -- along with the two compatriots who helped immortalize the scene, the photographer Glen E. Friedman and the skate-magazine writer Craig R. Stecyk.

Most of them had met originally as latch-key teenagers from broken homes. They earned their Zephyr Team T-shirt and Dogtown skateboard logo amid the rickety pilings underneath the abandoned Pacific Ocean Park and in the drained pools of unsuspecting Los Angeles homeowners. But after the Dogtown toughs vanquished the prim skateboarding toffs at the Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship (better known as the Del Mar Nationals) in 1975, big business muscled in. And soon the team broke apart as skateboarding companies and later movie studios seduced individual members with cash and sponsorships.

So if it was commerce that broke the Z-Boys apart, then it is art that has brought them together again. And here they are today, autographing title pages in a snooty bookstore -- as celebrities, as sportsmen, as artists and as reunited friends. Maybe art really can directly improve life and community.